Markus "Notch" Persson has long been the lead developer and face of the game …

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Markus "Notch" Persson has stepped down as the lead developer on Minecraft, according to a post on his Tumblr. Though he will still be involved in the game, Jens Bergensten, a developer for the game, will move into the role of lead developer as Persson goes to work on a "new project" with his development studio Mojang.

Persson notes that he and Bergensten have been working on Minecraft together for over a year. Minecraft 1.0 was finally released two weeks ago on November 18 during MineCon, creating a juncture that has apparently allowed Persson to feel comfortable scaling back his role with the game.

Persson will still be a developer for Minecraft, though he notes that he will "now rest for a while" following the leadership transition to Berngensten. When he returns, he will be starting work on a new project, the details of which he does not disclose.

Minecraft has a player base about four million strong, and they've been doing bigger things than ever with the game, including recreations from pop culture touchstones like Legend of Zelda, Star Wars, and Super Mario. May Bergensten enjoy a long and healthy reign.

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Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

91 Reader Comments

Wow, I haven't kept up on Minecraft but this is such a reversal. The last I heard about it (admittedly long ago) was love and joy raining from the heavens. Now it's pretty much gasoline and matches. Such a shame.

Wow, I haven't kept up on Minecraft but this is such a reversal. The last I heard about it (admittedly long ago) was love and joy raining from the heavens. Now it's pretty much gasoline and matches. Such a shame.

The basic gist of it is that Notch had a brilliant idea that a lot of gamers were willing to put money behind. And instead of taking that money and putting it toward the product everyone wanted, he hired a couple of people to work on something else, took many vacations, and hosted a conference.

I think we're all just bitter watching the guy squander a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He should have invested in infrastructure, and in people with the proper skills to get a project to a shipping state. Instead, we got whatever the fuck Minecraft 1.0 is, and some other projects no one cares about. Lightning isn't going to strike twice for him. And it's only a matter of time before someone who knows what the fuck they're doing comes along and puts out a better Minecraft.

I think we're all just bitter watching the guy squander a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He should have invested in infrastructure, and in people with the proper skills to get a project to a shipping state. Instead, we got whatever the fuck Minecraft 1.0 is, and some other projects no one cares about. Lightning isn't going to strike twice for him. And it's only a matter of time before someone who knows what the fuck they're doing comes along and puts out a better Minecraft.

Exactly. If anyone thinks we are being too harsh, just consider that they still keep the public webserver, the update server, and the login server on one machine. Unsurprisingly, it's down all the time, which makes it hard to play since you are supposed to have to log in to play, and pretty much have to to play online. That's complete amateur hour bullshit, and should have been fixed as soon as he made a few hundred dollars, much less 50 million or whatever it's up to now.

Wow, I haven't kept up on Minecraft but this is such a reversal. The last I heard about it (admittedly long ago) was love and joy raining from the heavens. Now it's pretty much gasoline and matches. Such a shame.

Clearly you've never graced the Minecraft forums. The fanbase for Minecraft is notoriously fickle and immature.

EDIT: That's not to say the criticism in this thread isn't warranted. It is.

Wow, I haven't kept up on Minecraft but this is such a reversal. The last I heard about it (admittedly long ago) was love and joy raining from the heavens. Now it's pretty much gasoline and matches. Such a shame.

That tends to be what happens when a game originally about mining and crafting becomes a game about... well, everything else. Hunger meters and XP bars, who wants that?

Speaking as someone who bought Minecraft VERY early in development as a direct result of listening to promises from Notch about forthcoming content and from extrapolating his then current speed of development, I feel like I have a right to be irritated at more news that circumstantially implies that Minecraft's progress is going to slow right down once again. I bought a seed because I was promised it would grow into an amazing plant with incredible fruit over time, and instead it's a stunted stalk on frozen ground.

I can accept that projects change over time, and that early promises can't always be fulfilled in the manner originally described, but it's legitimately slow going - look direct comparisons between analogous developers progress during the same time period - How far has Dwarf Fortress come - and how far has the entire game worth of content that is Terraria?

Even if Minecraft was based on such a radically different engine and premise to make such comparisons nonsensical, as stated above, modders have pushed out much better, deeper content in a fraction of the time that the 'official' teams offerings required - just look at the difference in quality between Millenaire and the 'official' NPC villages.

Lol, comparing the train-wreck of Minecraft development to the plane-wreck of DF development is enough to make someone swear off gaming all together. I think the lesson from both of those is that idea men need someone with an iron fist to run the business/planning side of things and keep the ship on course. Otherwise, the casual coder follows the path of least resistance, which is "cool" new features instead of stubborn old architectural issues and bugs. DF and MC are what you end up with when a semi-pro developer with very limited real-world large-project experience manages to get things right enough to gather a following.

It's interesting seeing the complaints, b/c they remind me a lot of investors complaining about not getting a good ROI on their principle. lol

Except because of Notch's transparency, he cannot hide behind "company secrets" that could legitimately have caused problems; instead he shows how most of the problems lie with him, not some vague "business issues" out of his control.

I guess I'm less inclined to complain about the negatives since my kids and I have gotten several hundred hours of entertainment out of my $13 investment. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

I guess I'm less inclined to complain about the negatives since my kids and I have gotten several hundred hours of entertainment out of my $13 investment. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

I won't go as far as say I didn't get my money's worth. But I will say there's no way in hell that Mojang is getting a penny more from me.